iTunes 10 is out. And everyone is bitching.

Feature bloat is a valid point, especially if you live outside of the USA. For the past few years, most of the new features in iTunes relate to movie and TV show purchases / rentals. None of those things are even available in Japan / many other countries. We don’t even have “Movies” or “Shows” buttons in our store. And while Ping doesn’t really do anything for me, I just see it as yet another feature (Radio, iTunes U, iTunes DJ, Genius, etc.) which has no bearing on my iTunes usage, but will likely be considered useful by others. That’s just been par for the course for me the past few years. 

With each new version, I have mostly been hoping upon hope that the application would just handle managing / playing music (you know, the initial primary purpose of the application) better. And one would figure with Jobs convincing developers to move away from Carbon that someone at Apple would take heed and get rid of all the cruft for what is arguably their flagship application. But since it’s still running on an archaic system, gaining more features and getting bigger and bigger it has been getting redonkey-kong slow as of late. I understand that most people probably don’t have a music collection the size of mine (you don’t want to know, trust me) but I cannot abide having as much as 30 second delays when jumping from one track to the next. However, in my 10 years of blogging, I have yet to write a rant about these points. I just don’t see the point.

Other people don’t feel silence is golden when they’re upset about changes to their beloved media player. And interestingly enough, the points I brought up are not the primary issues everyone is yelling about with the greatest fervor. What everyone hates is this:

SWEET HOLY MOTHER OF INFANT JESUS IN A MANGER! The buttons are rotated on their side now! Worlds are fucking colliding! 

Never mind that iTunes actually runs notably faster. Seriously, it does. Let’s all bitch and moan that three tiny buttons are now rotated 90°. I mean, for crying out loud, how often do people actually click them that some sort of muscle memory routine is thrown completely out of whack? And while I could excuse complaints about the sidebar icons now all being greyscale - as it does make finding the section you need take a bit longer for the majority of us who are not color-blind - the venom is mostly reserved for rotating buttons. Lots of people hate the new icon - of which I am not a great fan, but I’ve been changing my iTunes icon to something else for years with Candybar - but that pales in comparison to the menu buttons.

I guess the main thing about this which perplexes me is that I don’t think most people stare at their iTunes interface all day. so why get that upset about it? Most people I know have it hidden or minimised and only bring it into view when it’s time to switch albums or playlists. But the way the internet is having it out, you’d think the upper left corner of iTunes was their baby and Apple was a dingo.

But for those of you on a Mac who just can’t live with this travesty to your Mp3 player here are some instructions:

1. Quit iTunes.
2. Open the terminal.
3. Type: defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -
4. Enjoy your old iTunes buttons.
5. Move the fuck on with your life.

Sorry for the vitriol, but I’m just sick of seeing all the posts about this issue everywhere I turn.